Google Pressures eCommerce Search Vendors
November 6, 2009
Companies like Dieselpoint, Endeca, and Omniture Mercado face a new competitor. The Google has, according to Internet News, “launched Commerce Search, a cloud-based enterprise search application for e-tailers that promises to improve sales conversion rates and simplify the online shopping experience for their customers.” For me the most significant passage in the write up was:
Commerce Search not only integrates the data submitted to Google’s Product Center and Merchant Center but also ties into its popular Google Analytics application, giving e-tailers an opportunity to not only track customer behavior but the effectiveness of the customized search application. Once an e-tailer has decided to give Commerce Search a shot, it uploads an API with all its product catalog, descriptions and customization requirements and then Google shoots back an API with those specifications that’s installed on the Web site. Google also offers a marketing and administration consultation to highlight a particular brand of camera or T-shirt that the retailer wants to prominently place on its now customized search results. It also gives e-tailers full control to create their own merchandising rules so that it can, for example, always display Canon cameras at the top of its digital camera search results or list its latest seasonal items by descending price order.
Google’s technical investments in its programmable search engine, context server, and shopping cart service chug along within this new service. Google’s system promises to be fast. Most online shopping services are sluggish. Google knows how to deliver high speed performance. Combining Google’s semantic wizardry with low latency results puts some of the leading eCommerce vendors in a technology arm lock.
Some eCommerce vendors have relied on Intel to provide faster CPUs to add vigor to older eCommerce architectures. There are some speed gains, but Google delivers speed plus important semantic enhancements that offer other performance benefits. One example is content processing. Once changes are pushed to Google or spidered by Google from content exposed to Google, the indexes update quickly. Instead of asking a licensee of a traditional eCommerce system to throw hardware at a performance bottleneck or pay for special system tuning, the Google just delivers speed for structured content processed from the Google platform.
In my opinion, competitors will point out that Google is inexperienced in eCommerce. Google may appear to be a beginner in this important search sector. Looking more deeply into the engineering resources responsible for Commerce Search one finds that Google has depth. I hate to keep mentioning folks like Ramanathan Guha, but he is one touchstone whose deep commercial experience has influenced this Google product.
How will competitors like Dieselpoint, Endeca, and Omniture Mercado respond? The first step will be to downplay the importance of this Google initiative. Next I expect to learn that Microsoft Fast ESP has a better, faster, and cheaper eCommerce solution that plays well with SharePoint and Microsoft’s own commerce server technology. Finally, search leaders such as Autonomy will find a marketing angle to leave Google in the shadow of clever positioning. But within a year, my hunch is that Google’s Commerce Search will have helped reshape the landscape for eCommerce search. Google may not be perfect, but its products are often good enough, fast, and much loved by those who cannot imaging life without Google.
Stephen Arnold, November 6, 2009
I want to disclose to the Department of the Navy that none of these vendors offered me so much as a how de doo to write this article.
Comments
One Response to “Google Pressures eCommerce Search Vendors”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] Google Pressures eCommerce Search Vendors : Beyond Search […]